JAMES SMITHSON AND HIS BEQUEST. 179 



In this famous speech, Mr. Choate remarked that " our sense of duty 

 to the dead, the living, and the unborn who shall live; our justice, our 

 patriotism, our policy, common honesty, common decorum, urge us, are 

 enough to urge us, to go on without the delay of an hour, to appropri- 

 ate the bounty according to the form of the gift." He opposed any- 

 thing like the school or college proposed by Mr. Tappan on the ground 

 of its narrow utilitarianism, as being wholly unnecessary and in a great 

 degree useless. It would injure the universities already in existence; 

 it would be exceedingly difficult to secure students; the expense of pro- 

 fessors, books, apparatus, and buildings would secure a pretty energetic 

 diffusing of the fund but not much diffusion of knowledge. He ap- 

 proved of the suggestion that lectures should be delivered, especially 

 during the sessions of Congress, not by professors permanently tixed on 

 annual salaries, but by gentlemen eminent in science and literature, to 

 be invited to Washington under the stimulus and with the ambition of 

 a special and conspicuous retainer. He preferred however that the one 

 simple object of the Institution should be to accumulate a grand and 

 noble public library, one which for variety, extent, and wealth should 

 be equal to any in the world. He claimed that this scheme was the 

 only one that "would prevent the waste of money in jobs, salaries, sine- 

 cures and quackeries, and would embody Smithson's idea in some tangi- 

 ble form, some exponent of civilization, permanent, palpable, conspicu- 

 ous, useful, and than which nothing was safer, surer, or more unexcep- 

 tionable." 



Mr. Choate presented many interesting facts in regard to the public 

 libraries of the world, and argued in his peculiarly forcible and eloquent 

 manner that such a plan as he proposed was within the terms and spirit 

 of the trust. 



"That directs us to 'increase and diffuse knowledge among men. 

 And do not the judgments of all the wise; does not the experience of 

 all enlightened states ; does not the whole history of civilization concur 

 to declare that a various and ample library is one of the surest, most 

 constant, most permanent and most economical instrumentalities to in- 

 crease and diffuse knowledge? There it would be, durable as liberty, 

 durable as the Union ; a vast storehouse, a, vast treasury of all the facts 

 which make up the history of man and of nature, so far as that history 

 has been written; of all the truths which the inquiries and experiences 

 of all the races and ages have found out; of all the opinions that have 

 been promulgated; of all the emotions, images, sentiments, examples, 

 of all the richest audmosi instructive literatures; the whole past speak- 

 ing to the present and the future — a silent, yet wise and eloquent 

 teacher. * * * 



"If the terms of the trust then authorize this expenditure, why not 

 make it .' Not among the principal, nor yet the least of reasons for 

 doing so, is, that all the while that you are laying out your money, and 

 when you have laid it out, you have the money's worth, the value re- 



